This is preliminary to talking about this passage from Luke. Jesus is setting this thing up in the most stark way, that is, the Pharisees were the truly pious Jews; these were the really seriously religious people. And tax collectors were, if not mafia types, very close to it. And so, he wants to establish a contrast as sharply as possible.

But then, what is really the problem here? My suspicion is that the first level of response to this is that it is very bad form. The Pharisee is guilty of really bad form. You do not go and promote yourself that way. It is sort of nasty and vulgar. It is just not a nice thing to do...to say that "Well, I am really glad I am not like those other guys". That understanding does not have anything to do with the sense of the text. That, I think, says more about how we hear this stuff, and where we are, then it says about the text itself. What is the problem, then, if it is not just a kind of self-display that we would find distasteful?

Well, these people are supposed to be praying. What is praying about? Praying is the great existential moment where we seek for God to the exclusion of all of our other occupations. That is why it is so difficult to do, because we are all so wretchedly busy, hag-ridden by our agendas, e-mails, laptops, and our calendars. And, unfortunately, we think it ought to be that way. In fact, I think that if we are not busy we feel that something is wrong with us. I do not think that that was the case in Jesus' time, but that it is our problem with prayer: simply trying to still all of this noise.

But I think that the primary reason that it is difficult to still all that noise - - and there are several reasons - - is that that noise consists of a chorus of voices telling me who I am and where I belong in the world: "You are a really important person because you are so busy! You have so many obligations and responsibilities, why, you must be important; you must be a truly significant human being!". Well, I think that it is very difficult to walk out from under that load - - I have a terrible time doing it. Yet the basic presupposition of prayer is that all of these voices are giving us wrong information. What they are saying to us about who we are - which of course is simply an echo of our own desires, ambitions, and appetites to be somebody - is all wrong. Prayer assumes that we do not know who we are. And to move from this premature certainty as to who we are and where we belong, (and of course the two are inseparable) to a position of real ignorance as to who we are is extraordinarily difficult. That is why I do not think that many of us pray very much or very long. I do not.

But then there is another deliverance of prayer that is contained in this. The way the Pharisee operated had what effect? To absolutely distance himself from everybody else. He is very sure of who he was: "I am not like these other people. They are a bunch of bums". And they were! And this is the interesting thing! But what is the Pharisee's problem? His problem is that he brings his own self-understanding before God and sort of flaunts it in God's face: "You see, I am a really fine human being". He therefore goes away, not only unjustified, but ignorant of himself, ignorant of who he really was. I think that the rubric for prayer, besides, as I said last week, "Thy Kingdom come," - is a line from Augustine. In one of his own prayers he says, "Lord, let me know myself. Let me know you". You cannot do one without the other. You cannot know God without knowing yourself. Clearly, the Pharisee did not know either but was quite content to hold on to this sense of himself, stand before God, and tell God what is what. He knew who he was. He knew who God was too: "God is going to congratulate me because I am such a fine fellow". That is not prayer.

Finally, the thing that prayer is to do is this. If, by leading an active and earnest life of prayer I come to know who I am and who God is, then what that means, among other things, is that I also know I am radically connected to everybody else. This is very hard for us in North America because we bring our own agendas to God, as well as our own sense of ourselves, and of course the two are inseparable. To pray, to seek God, is to come to discover the god who is the god of everybody and, therefore, this means I am radically connected to everybody, above all, those people that are most remote. And this is why over and over in the career of Jesus you have this extraordinary attentiveness to all of the invisible people in his own society: the poor, women, the handicapped, and the sinners, these four great categories, in first-century Palestine, of the faceless and anonymous ones.

So, I think that we have come a long, long distance from this business of this guy simply showing off. There is something much more grave going on than his simply breaching the etiquette of polite society. There is a radical ignorance and self-sufficiency whereby he simply construes who he is under his own steam or hears all of these other voices echoing his own desires, rather than in ignorance, darkness, and trust seeking this god who will tell the prayer who they are, who God is, and how they are connected to everybody else.